Thomas Jørgensen

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  .. What if it was? I'm now trying to think of some reason for Radio Astronomy to suddenly be worth Oceans Of Money. SETI for fun and profit? Picking up Galactic Public News Broadcasts (Deeply outdated) turns into a good...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  ... How about this. Fermi Paradox, Subtype : Alien Hyper "Freyas" (Hat-tip to the host). In the deep past an alien species existed which, while not very human, did have both something which resembled a market economy if you squinted...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I've seen a lot of people making this argument from various political corners. It's a popular idea. It's also just one more version of austerity thinking and just as wrong as the rest of them - The poor don't give...
• Commented on Place your bets
  ... An AI that can actually output a good set of meta data for that kind of hyper-compressed speech stream would also be a valuable tool for teaching. Because that means prompt automated feedback on intonation, rhythm, ect. The market...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  ... electrolysis of the lifting gas is neither a meaningful cost or obstacle for high altitude ballooning. Heck, you might do it that way just because splitting some tap water for each launch is simpler logistics than ordering in gas...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Lets see.. Fun alternate histories: "The Sugar Republics". The French revolution takes a few different turns here and there, Nappy catches a cannonball, Robespierre dies of an infected splinter at age 12, whatever and the upshot is that the Republic...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Not only is this misanthropic as all hell, it would also almost certainly not work out that way. Modern land use increases primary productivity because of industrial nitrogen fixation. If that stops, most of the land would likely end up...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Seaborne transport is a very, very high percentage of all transport kilometers of freight in Europe. So if you can't just load it on a ship, the container is useless. The laws reflect and reinforce that....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  If you can just.. raid entirely different species for intelligence boosting genes and that actually works... that is the world broken over the knee of the first mover to just stick a bunch of bird and cephalopod genes into homo...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I come across this species of argument a lot. "Horses are sometimes shoed badly, so riding is obviously impossible" It's silly. Automated Warehousing is not a mature tech, so it has teething problems. Its also absolutely taking over the entire...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  The funny thing about this discussion is that warehouses are already getting fully automated.. and not by super advanced AI, but instead by making the entire building into a machine for storing things. You can reduce the required smarts immensely...
• Commented on WTF
  The debt limit is not derived from the constitution in any way, shape or form. It's simply a law. It is in fact pretty blatantly unconstitutional given that it questions the validity of US debts.. which is expressly forbidden....
• Commented on WTF
  It's not just gambling. I have long subscribed to the theory that a whole lot of the very strange pricing on used books on amazon and similar is just people who want to pay taxes on illegal earnings so they...
• Commented on WTF
  Then there is the "Time travel as Fermi Paradox answer". All civilizations eventually invent time travel. They proceed to keep changing their own history until that results in a history in which time travel can never be invented by them....
• Commented on WTF
  Yhea, but if you are in "The harvest is going to suck" mode, that really isn't a show stopper. Put two engines in it. Nobody is going to let the perfect be the enemy of Eating....
• Commented on WTF
  Engines generally don't object to being run constantly at their optimal speed. Will a repurposed car engine last the life of the boat? Perhaps not. But it wouldn't be a problem until you put enough hours on it to actually...
• Commented on WTF
  That it already exists is the point? Known, reliable solve. Mechanized Fishing vastly beats farming on "Calories per work and resources invested" up until you overfish the seas, which a single small city cannot do. Being up a river is...
• Commented on WTF
  Hence the freezers. It's more a security concern than it is a travel time concern as your boat is a lot easier to catch on a river than at sea. Fortunately, riverine piracy was.. uhm.. Frowned Upon does not quite...
• Commented on WTF
  If you have a small community of uptimers in a past place and time where regular farming is questionable.. you don't build green houses. You build fishing boats with refrigeration. You are in a time before over-fishing the seas happened...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  The Russian nuclear arsenal has permissive action links. The US did deliberate tech transfer of this technology a lot. Congress wouldn't sign off on giving it to the soviets.. but whether that meant Moscow had to actually brew their own...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  That is not one collision. That is picking ten collisions over one. Which would be summed, so it picks the car. Or ideally, a verge. Actually, almost always a verge. Remember, rule one is "don't crash"....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  It's not difficult to design a laser range finder that can pick out its own signal from any level of such noise. Just.. modulate the laser. Lasers that encode signals are so standard it probably isn't even a meaningful price...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Giving more power to the US courts is a terrible idea given the extent they have been infiltrated by the Federalist Society. Also just in general. Rule by judges is not a good idea. The more general problem is that...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Teslas self-driving problem is that they are restricted by managment fiat to try and solve the problem using only cameras. That is probably possible, since, well, humans basically rely on vision for this problem, so that is an existence proof...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  The way an algorithm for this sort of thing will be written will inevitably be an ordering something like this : A: Don't crash. B: If crashing cannot physically be avoided, pick the crash that involves the lowest speed collision....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  The embodied carbon of an EPR, which is the heaviest reactor in existence, is equivalent to the carbon emissions of running an EPR sized coal plant for 3.5 days. This does Not Matter. Nor will it tip anything anywhere. I...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  It.. doesn't have to be. Moving big blocks into place with machine assistance is quite fast. So if we put a lot of effort into developing high-productivity quarrying tech, well, in terms of strength Granite is strictly superior to concrete...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Nuclear actually needs shockingly little concrete per MWH produced. Reactors are big piles of it, yes, but they are on all the time, they produce a lot of power and last a really long time....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  You know what, if you want to reengineer things so people don't have to buy cars with enormous batteries for that occasional long distance trip... you don't need super fast charging or other new innovations. Just stick pantographs on them....